It is well known that color photography is a process for obtaining dye images by developing a photosensitive material having dye-forming couplers and silver halide emulsions on a support with an aromatic primary amine developing agent, to cause the oxidized product produced from the developing agent to react with the dye-forming couplers (hereinafter called couplers).
The field of color photography has been under strong demand to simplify and to make rapid this color development processing, and many improvements have been made in order to meet this demand; and new, simple, and rapid systems are developed every few years.
To make the process rapid, it is required to shorten the processing time of each of the color-developing step, the bleach-fix step, the washing step, and the drying step. As a method for making the processing rapid, for example, a process is disclosed in International Publication Patent No. WO 87-04534, wherein a high-silver-chloride silver halide color photographic material is rapidly processed with a color developer substantially free from sulfite ions and benzyl alcohol. Although that document discloses how to shorten the developing time, it does not disclose at all how to shorten the time required to wash out, by the development processing, photographic dyes and the like used for increasing the sharpness of an image; and further, since the process does use sulfite ions, which have an effect of decoloring photographic dyes, if the process is applied as it is, the lowering in whiteness of the non-image portion is a problem. Further, although a process for quickening desilvering by lowering the pH of a bleach-fix solution is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,828,970, this process undesirably acts to delay washing out of photographic dyes, and therefore, lowering of whiteness remains a problem.
The amount of water-soluble dyes to be used is apt to increase in future years with the market's strong demand for improved sharpness.
JP-A ("JP-A" means unexamined published Japanese patent application) No. 286849/1988 discloses a technique for maintaining the optical reflection density at a certain level or over in the case wherein a water-soluble dye is used.
For such an increase in the amount of water-soluble dyes to be used for increasing the sharpness of an image, rapid processing as described above results in an increase of the residual amount of water-soluble dye after the processing, which becomes a serious problem in terms of lowering whiteness.
To quicken the washing out of a water-soluble dye, it is generally effective to reduce the thickness of the film. But if the thickness of the color-forming layer is reduced too much, the desired density of the image cannot be obtained, lowering of the sharpness of the visual image is brought about, and, in spite of the use of the colorant, in some cases, it is likely to occur that the "apparent" sharpness appears lower by contrast. In some cases, an image that was sharp immediately after its printing loses sharpness due to bleeding of the image during storage. If the thickness of an intermediate layer is reduced too much, a problem arises as colors mix due to the processing occurs, which damages the sharpness of color. The so-called protective layer for protecting silver halide emulsions is generally made up of two layers, i.e., an ultraviolet-absorbing layer and a layer covering it. If the ultraviolet-absorbing layer is made thinner, the ultraviolet-absorbing performance is lowered, which lowers the preservability of the image. If the covering layer which is the uppermost layer is made thinner, fogging sensitivity is lowered by pressure, or flaws occur, or a high-boiling organic solvent used as a medium for dispersing an oil-soluble material bleeds out onto the surface of the image, thereby making the surface of the image sticky or causing a powdery material to separate out onto the surface.
Thus, actually obtaining a color image high in image sharpness and high in whiteness of the non-image portion by rapid processing is accompanied by many difficulties, and development of a technique for solving these problems has been awaited.